Graveyard of Memories: John Rain, Book 8 Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00I0B9BWE | Format: PDF
Graveyard of Memories: John Rain, Book 8 Description
What makes a legendary assassin? For John Rain, it was the lessons of love, war, and betrayal he learned in Tokyo in 1972.
Fresh from the killing fields of Southeast Asia, Rain works as a bagman under the watchful eye of his CIA handler, delivering cash to corrupt elements of the Japanese government. But when a delivery goes violently wrong, Rain finds himself in the crosshairs of Japan's most powerful yakuza clan. To survive, Rain strikes a desperate deal with his handler: take out a high-profile target in the Japanese government in exchange for the intel he needs to eliminate his would-be executioners.
As Rain plays cat and mouse with the yakuza and struggles to learn his new role as contract killer, he also becomes entangled with Sayaka, a tough, beautiful ethnic Korean woman confined to a wheelchair. But the demands of his dark work are at odds with the longings of his heart - and with Sayaka's life in the balance, Rain will have to make a terrible choice.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 10 hours and 3 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Brilliance Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: February 11, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00I0B9BWE
Barry Eisler had created one of the great characters of modern thrillers, the cerebral, thoughtful, merciless assassin John Rain, whose specialty was murder that looked like it was the result of natural causes. Rain, the offspring of a Japanese father and American mother was terminally conflicted about who he was and what he was. Eisler constructed a perfect character who meticulously plotted out his murders, but was also capable of inflicting lethal mayhem in any given instant.
Bit by bit, though, Eisler let his politics seep into his novels and, worse yet, into the John Rain character. In the last of the Rain novels, then “Requiem for an Assassin”, now re-titled “The Killer Ascendant”, I concluded that Eisler had fully wussified John Rain and turned his novel into rants for a political philosophy I didn’t agree with.
I stopped reading anything by Barry Eisler.
Seven years later and I have the opportunity to read and review what I believe is the attempted return of John Rain.
This is a prequel, taking us back to 1972 and the 20 year old Japanese/American John (Jun) Rain, fresh from the Vietnam War, making his way through Tokyo.
It is an excellent thriller. Eisler has always been an excellent storyteller and he remains one. The book is rich with authentic detail of life in Tokyo, martial arts, the art of savoring tea, details of gardens and cemeteries, jazz and more. When John Rain attends a dojo, you smell the sweat. When he checks into a “love hotel”, the scent of rushed, paid encounters is in the air. Eisler is ismply brilliant in this.
This book is a rich experience by an author at the height of his powers. I sat down and read the first 183 pages before taking a break.
John Rain is not an assassin. He is a 20 year old hot head with skills but no patience, no overview, no wisdom; he's not even good with girls. So this is an origin story. Rain is a bagman for the CIA and at the start of this story he is a manipulated pawn stumbling through a minefield of lethal obstacles by skill and luck. At the conclusion of this book he is a few weeks older, and wiser to the extent that he has learned how little he knows and determined to become the cool and analytical assassin we know from Eisler's earlier stories of the older, more complex man.
And, as Rain says, he does not see the forest for the trees. This week or two set him on a course that will burden him forever with memories and choices that will never leave him.
This is no tired episode from an exhausted franchise. This is a hot story. Lots of action, leanly described. Martial arts stuff I will never understand but that sounds great. Guns, fists, knives, hammers. You get plenty of electricity (hidden spoiler) along with your cerebral stuff. Oh, and romance with an erotic sinew that felt more like poetry than like purple prose.
Besides being a taut violent thriller, this is a travelogue of 70's Japan. Neighborhoods, cemeteries, tram lines, parks, and oh yes, the lovingly described coffee houses that actually exist. I had to drink some drip grind while reading this. And I think Barry writes, or used to write his stuff at a coffee shop in Palo Alto that shall remain nameless. His love of the brew shines through.
I love the details of tradecraft that Rain picks up along the way, often by dint of hindsight.
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